What I’ve been wanting to do for a while is put a list together of all of the books that I want to recommend offhand to people who are new to homeschool and not sure how or where to get their bearings. I am hoping that this blog post will serve that purpose. It is not by any means comprehensive in the general sense or with regard to me personally. When we first began to consider homeschooling back in 2012, I went on a reading spree. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find many books in the library nearest to us, so essentially I put a hold on every book I could find at various branches quite a distance from us, and then I read them all. The list that follows, then draws mostly from memory (which is fallible of course), and more heavily from my goodreads list! (Please note this is also why the formatting sucks, but I don’t have the time to make it pretty, just to get it out there 🙂 )

In the beginning I was hesitant to update all of the books I was reading on there for fear of judgment from friends and family. God forbid I out myself as a homeschool before I was ready. Now though, the cat has been out of the bag for several years, and I’m so glad that I was able to save that list!

One thing I wanted to add, is that when I was first starting out, I was yearning for informative and up to date homeschool blogs. These people must be out there! I thought. Entering our 6th year I now see the reality that homeschoolers are probably just to busy out there doing things to blog. Many of us do, however, frequent instagram (the waldorf accounts are particularly aesthetically pleasing). So I would highly recommend signing up on there if you would like a more vivid depiction of the oft asked question of beginners of, “but what do you DO all day?” I asked that question several times in various facebook forums “back in the day.” Here is one post I wrote for a friend’s blog on that topic: http://www.themomstreetjournal.com/freedom-matters-day-life-homeschool-lawyer/

This list is nowhere NEAR exhaustive. There are tons and tons of other authors, books, websites, blogs, and resources, so if you do not see something here that speaks to you, do not be disheartened. I just hope this can help give some direction to those interested in learning more! Additionally, in doing this I realized how many particular curriculum/books/resources might be helpful for the actual day to day doing. I sprinkled in some websites in this post for that reason, although upon further reflection they’re pretty out of place, oh well!

Pam is AMAZING, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE her podcast. It always makes me think critically about things and inspires me to be a better homeschool parent. It was from one of her episodes that I learnt of The Gardener and The Carpenter book. I highly highly recommend it if you’re into that sort of thing. Check it out here: Living Joyfully With Unschooling

Pam also featured the author of this book, which I had forgotten I purchased!

The Waldorf Homeschool Handbook by Donna Ashton (I haven’t actually read this one yet, but I have it on my shelf.

Chirsopherus Homeschool, Waldorf Essentials, and Earth Schooling are the three most “legit” in terms of what is out there for homeschoolers that I have limited experience with. I have also seen praise for Lavender’s Blue and Wild Onions (may be just a blog). Oak Meadow is also Waldorf ish, but does not follow the typical Waldorf format of main lessons, and rather eschew’s the model for common core alignment (or so I have heard.

Feel free to leave me a comment if you enjoyed the list or if you have a question!

Recently, while we were eating out at a local restaurant, someone actually approached our table and said that our family had the best behaved small children they had ever seen. They had a teenage son. Can you imagine? 😀

We have been doing a lot lately. I know this is true because when I look back at all the photos that I have taken, I see, objectively all the places we have been, things we have done, people we have seen, etc. However, it’s difficult to have the mental space to keep running tally of what exactly we have been up to.

This year, we are part of a charter. For those unfamiliar with homeschooling — hey I had NO idea what this was even after we started homeschooling– a charter is registered with the state of California, and works with parents to procure the materials they want, while maintaining supervision over the students, including meetings every so many school days, etc. All of these charters have different nuances. So for our charter, I have to submit grades, for example. Arbitrary. I definitely dislike.

However, as I submitted my grades for my 5 and 7 year old, I decided to include a brief overview of what we have been up to– I sometimes have to send this in/tell the teacher as well. What follows are excerpts of verbatim what I told our “teacher”:

We took a fieldtrip to Cal Academy, and the girls were volunteers in an Ocean Acidification experiment.

As part of this, they blew into straws, which then blew into the water that contained purple cabbage water, to demonstrate the production of additional CO2 in the ocean. It was really amazing, actually. We did a lot of other cool stuff there too. This was one of the first times that my 5 year old was engaged in what was going on in the exhibits.

For example, she grabbed a nearby guide of the different fish, and started pointing out which ones were in front of her. This was just one thing that stands out in my memory. Big changes!

We’ve been working on reading The Little House in the Big Woods, and watching some episodes of Little House on the Prairie.

Little House is a big thing in the local homeschool culture, perhaps the culture at large, I couldn’t say. (In fact, one of our friends recently visited the Laura Ingalls museum/site in Missouri! Jealous!) But when this book was assigned as a part of the Mentoring in the Classics cohort, I knew this was our best chance at getting the girls interested. I also happened to have ordered them sun bonnets to replace their floppy previous sun hats.

“Kindness and neighborliness are not just for Sundays, Laura.” We happened to pick up Season 2, which opens with the incredibly annoying and unpleasant storekeeper/neighbors protesting over the girls having an unfair advantage at collecting leaves by going on a camping trip. All I could think in my head was “Whatever!” The girls, LOVED watching. They continued to point out how mean and sour that family was, and how nice the Ingalls family was. It was neat to watch. There are still some stressful and probably advanced story lines in the show, so we won’t watch it too often, but I could really see how it made the pages of Little House come more alive for the kids.

Little House in the Big Woods was actually the book for December, so we are a bit behind, and still working on it. Just don’t tell the librarian!

[7 year old] is continuing to work on her times tables, and both girls like playing the chocolate chip Math game that we bought at the thrift store.

“5 times 5 is 25, mom. My friend told me, it’s true!” These days even my 3 year old asks me what 2 plus 2 is and then 4 plus 4. It’s interesting and exciting to them. I remember what that was like. Multiplication drills were fun because they were isolated, short, and I knew them. They have their time and place, and I’m glad my kids like completing them when they feel like it. Chocolate Chip Math is essentially a Math facts drill game with the guise of chocolate chip cookies. (I can’t link to it because it literally is not linkable, like I said my 5 year old picked it out at the thrift store!) I had nothing to do with the selection, just like I don’t usually have anything to with them playing it– Inspire Not Require.

We’ve also been playing LOTS of Horseopoly— the kids are obsessed with counting money and learning about how transactions work. My 7 year old is also very interested in horses.

We recently got some 15 penpals for the girls across the country! I think only 1 is homeschooled! So we bought paper, pens, envelopes, stamps, and after the girls wrote their letters, we took a trip to the Post Office to mail them. We have a map of the U.S. noted with all the states of where the friends live.

I am realizing now that at least two of these sibling penpal sets are homeschooled, oh well! This has been really neat because my 5 year old dictates her letters to me, then signs them, and the envelopes herself. My 7 year old writes the letters herself (we need to work on handwriting, this provides the least arbitrary setting), and also writes her name and the intended person’s name. She could also write the addresses, but I worry that the USPS would not be able to read them– which brings me to the point of this post, eventhough this is only the middle of all the things I have to say here:

A stamp has to be in the upper right hand corner of the envelope, or it will not get mailed.

Just like the recipient’s address must be neatly printed in the middle of the envelope, and the return address goes in the upper left hand corner.

I’ve long accepted the unschool/TJEd notion that requiring things arbitrarily isn’t necessary because actually living life presents opportunities for children to see firsthand that sometimes things MUST be done a certain way. Reflecting on this point I realized the envelope situation. My 5 year old started putting stamps wherever she pleased, like stickers. I had to move the stamps or else who knows what bureaucratic situation would have her letters cast aside. In order for them to reach their destination, the stamp needs to go where it needs to go, because. That’s it. Life Lesson. Sometimes rules are arbitrary and we MUST follow them if we want to accomplish our goal.

We’ve also started listening to many different History audio CDs that we have downloaded through Freegal (a free library service). We have listened to Greek Myths and also Story of the World.

This is a BIG thing for us because my 5 year old has up until now HATED audio books. Like the second I put them on, she literally starts screaming, “NO!!!!!!! Turn this off, it’s STUPID! I HATE IT!!!!” I posted this in a TJEd #Fail post on facebook recently. Well, these days she is actually tolerating AND LISTENING TO Audio CDs!

The other day we were listening to SOTW (Story of the World), and it was talking about Ancient China, and how they were trying to make gold, but one day instead discovered gun powder. I looked in my rearview mirror to see my 5 year old with a suprised look on her face, and then she said (after the narrator) “It exploded!!” Oh! Also, my 7 year old has begun her Mandarin Rosetta Stone study, will have to blog about that experience later!

If you haven’t heard about Freegal, you MUST check it out. You can download FREE audio tracks. They have music, ebooks, and also these Greathall CDs narrated by the homeschool celeb Jim Weiss— whom, incidentally I also did not know was so well known. Guys, check it, he is a professional story teller!!!! Talk about a neat calling in life! And we love him, he’s great.

So back to Freegal, we downloaded CDs on Greek Mythology, the Old Testament, Jewish Holidays, and Galileo thus far. There is a daily download limit, so I have to go back and get a few more tracks at a time, that I then burn for car trips. I am LOVING it, and I think the kids are too!

I have so many other things I want to say, but I still need to go back and add pictures, and I have big plans for our Kidschool today, so that’s all for now! Check back later this week for more TJEd posts!

I can’t remember where I last left off, except that we were expecting, and now have received our blessing, baby number 4.

It’s funny, during the end of my pregnancy, I received SO many encouraging comments and anecdotes from strangers, in places from Target to Trader Joe’s– and not when my children were on their best behavior.

Then, ironically to me, as we were shopping in Target for some post-baby clothes for mama, we were approached by another family, and the mom assumed we were a homeschooling family. Not sure if it was the four kids, my maxi skirt, or the fact that we were shopping in the middle of the day. Anyway, it made me smile, not only because of the knowing acceptance of homeschooling from another homeschool family, but also because of how quickly the “movement” is growing, and also the fact that on any given day, in a chain retail store, you can encounter a homeschool family.

So that’s that.

Next, I am delighted that our new curriculum arrived: Learning Language Arts Through Literature, Spellwell, and Writing With Ease. I didn’t realize that WWE was by Susan Wise Bauer (essentially the founder of the Classical education movement in homeschool), so I was further delighted to see that. Although we are only a few days in, what I have skimmed through looks great! Also, we are finally into the Singapore 1A book on a daily basis, so I am happy about that. I may have mentioned that because of the counterintuitiveness with which material is presented, we needed to focus on fundamental math facts before the Singapore method made sense to my daughter.

We also snagged an awesome chemistry kit, with some 28-36 chemistry labs for little kids. So far, we have blown up a balloon with vinegar and baking soda, and the kids are asking every day to “do science.” Because of their younger ages, this is much easier for me to do right now than all of the writing required with the REAL Science curriculum. I’d rather have something ready to go that we can complete on a whim, rather than not do science at all, and have our curriculum collect dust. Lakeshore Learning also has an electricity, light, and magnet set, which we will most likely pick up one at a time as necessary. (Except for magnet, I’m too paranoid to have those in the house right now.)

We also picked up a Picasso master’s art kit, which I thought was filled with different projects. As it turns out, in addition to a small book with information about the artist and his style (of which we already have a strikingly similar biographical book), there were 6 or so pieces of thick scrapbook paper to make a collage. Although my 6 year old enjoyed it, I don’t quite think it merited the $10 price.

The other big thing going on, is that I am focused on securing service opportunities for my kids. Aside from my own bleeding heart aspirations, my kids truly need to serve others and learn compassion. Last month we were able to revisit the senior home we went to last year, to once again hand out valentines to the residents. Eventhough I was some 38 weeks pregnant, it went much better than I anticipated. The seniors were delighted to see the children, and it was wonderful to be able to bring some joy into their day. The home coordinator was so happy, she wanted to arrange another visit right away. So, our wonderful group leaders arranged a Spring related visit in April. Eventhough I am certain it will be very challenging to wrangle my 4, I knew we had to sign up. I am very much looking forward to it, and I think my kids will have fun too. Also, one of the added bonuses of having a group that we regularly attend, is that my kids, my oldest in particular, has friends that she loves seeing, and ends up palling around with for at least part of the time, so it changes our dynamic somewhat.

Additionally, as part of our homeschool day, my oldest has to read aloud a certain number of books to me every night. She has to read aloud so that I can ensure she is reading the entire book, and also to help her with words she doesn’t know. We’ve tried the reading to herself, and she basically skims and quickly turns the pages.

So during one of these reading sessions, or perhaps when she was reading to one of her siblings, it dawned on me that perhaps I could join her budding enthusiasm for reading with service somehow. This gave me the idea to organize a read to seniors program with our local library. Ideally, there would be a pairing of a homeschool child (since this would take place during school hours), and a senior, and the child would read one or two books (depending on the book, reading level, etc.), to the same senior every month, with the hopes that they would form a lasting friendship. I am excited to be in the talks with one of our local librarians, and he thinks that the program could be a great contribution. There are certainly more than enough homeschoolers in this area to make it work!

Lastly, this isn’t exactly related, but it’s something that I wanted to convey, just because I am a homeschool mom does not mean that I have some sort of super human patience or unlimited energy. In fact, I have been criticized for appearing to be the opposite by a former acquaintance.

To the contrary, one of my closest homeschool mom friends recently told me that she describes me to other people as “someone who thrives on chaos,” and I think that is an accurate and favorable description. I say this as we are having a typical difficult Monday, where kids are still recovering from the weekend, fighting on essentially everything I ask them related to school, etc.

The reason I wanted to relay this message, is because I know that when I was researching whether homeschool was right for us, I had this notion that there was only one way of doing it, and only one type of homeschool mom, but it isn’t true. There are literally so many options and so many ways of doing it, that if you feel a calling, which I certainly do, you can make it work. Some days it is SO hard, but being committed to what is right for you family can bring you through to those magical days, and give you the steam to keep going.

I’m not sure why, but for some reason, every time January rolls around, I begin mildly obsessing about curriculum.

I have already been thinking about next year for quite some time, since my oldest will be a “big” First Grader, which is essentially the age where traditional philosophies (read Charlotte Mason and Classical instruction) recommend beginning a more intense type of study.

We are already in possession of several of the materials we will need for next year, because I mistakenly believed that my girl would be ready for them this year. I mean, she could have completed the assignments, but not without excessive prompting and handholding from me, which 1) is impossible considering our other little people; and 2) seemingly besides the point.

So we made the decision to get her reading, first at all, and then independently, and also to strengthen her basic math skills, so that come next fall, I can actually hand her the folders of prepared materials, and she can get to work, literally.

However, I declined to select a language arts program, because I was hoping that we could follow the Ambleside Online literature. I’m not sure whether I will abandon that plan or not, but I have been increasingly looking at Learning Language Arts Through Literature, (thought I’m not sure whether we would go with Blue or Red), and Writing With Ease. I am also very interested in this critical thinking program, and a spelling regiment.

This year has really served as a learning opportunity. While my girl loves to be able to choose things, in the end she really flourishes when I give her limited options that I know she is capable of doing on her own. We are struggling to boost her confidence so that when something appears challenging she doesn’t immediately feel overwhelmed and incapable of trying. And her confidence is really improving, it is heartwarming. For example, in completing some reading comprehension exercises, she used to merely answer the questions with the one word answer. However, after one or two times, she started answering in complete sentences on her own fruition. So neat!

Lastly, I am incredibly looking forward to a major “school room” reorganization. The layout of our current house is funky, wherein we essentially have one very large room, within which to accomplish schooling and daily living. It is also, therefore, incredibly inflexible. We are planning on moving within the next few months, for various reasons, and I am keeping an eye out for different ways of setting up/organizing our space, and attempting to anticipate what our changing needs might be–as my younger daughter will be starting K next fall as well.

During this last year of semi-flux for my big girl, in addition to utilizing some of the resources we have, and supplementing with trips to the library, I also get TONS of stuff on the internet, for FREE! I recently realized that I rarely remember the names of the sites, since I have them bookmarked, which is kind of an unorganized way to start the day.

Also, I have many friends with whom I’d love to share these sites, but I haven’t really had any way of doing so. Therefore, today it dawned on me, what better way to do things than to link them on here. That way they have a potentially farther reach, and they are organized in a coherent way. I’ll try to put as much info in the description as I can, and if I get really ambitious, I’ll actually review the sites individually, so that you can learn the types of content they have.

While we use the preschool-1st grade pages, I think most of the pages have resources for older grades as well.

Also, if you have some sites you love, feel free to send them my way, or comment here!

If you’re like me, a person who struggled with math at one pout or another, you may worry about being able to teach your kid math.

Despite my having to go to tutoring hours every.single.day to earn a B+ in Statistics in college, I’m beginning to see that there are tons of Math homeschool resources out there. We plan on using either Math u See or Singapore Math when the kids are older, but in the meantime we have a great K Math workbook, and some man blocks:

So I had to help her make sure she had the right number of blocks on each side of the plus sign, and without my help she missed 3/16, but for just turning 5 I am please. And the best part is that se thinks it’s fun! So yay for math!